Corporate Cash Streams Into Ohio to Unseat Senator Sherrod Brown

Everybody expects Ohio to be a battleground come November, with political attack ads on every channel and phones ringing off the hook with election-related robocalls. Even though it's only spring, corporate cash is already flooding into the state as big money looks to unseat one of the most progressive members of the Senate, Sherrod Brown.

“They see this race as important to getting a majority in the US Senate regardless of what happens in the presidential race,” Brian Rothenberg of ProgressOhio told AlterNet. “Ohio is a swing state in a couple of ways; one is the presidency but the other is the Senate.”

And Greg Sargent at the Washington Post noted recently, “In what may come as a surprise to many Democrats, the Ohio Senate race appears to be the target of more spending by GOP-aligned outside groups than the Warren contest or any other Senate race in the country.”

It's likely to come down to organized people versus big money in a state that boasts a fired-up progressive-labor movement that recently beat back GOP governor John Kasich's attack on workers' union rights. Grassroots groups in the Buckeye State are now skilled in running campaigns from the ground up, and Brown, unlike many of his fellow Democrats, has always been unequivocal about declaring which side he's on, winning his 2006 race through a kind of economic populism that many Dems seem uncomfortable emulating (and that prefigured the rise and popularity of Elizabeth Warren).